Just saying “all lives matter” is getting people sacked.
There’s a double standard here, and I’d say it’s due the liberal bias in professional/middle class/white collar environments.
What the fuck does abolish whiteness mean?
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I’ve barely commented in this thread, but have read so many posts and tangential arguments that it’s easy to lose sight of the real purpose / rationale behind the recent protests.
Black folks are not treated as fairly as most other folks. It’s as simple as that. To argue otherwise is fucking stupid. How that inequality is highlighted or fought against is not really the main point - as a society we need to work towards finding a way of looking at every single person in the exact same light. Fighting our own innate prejudices is the very heart of this matter. Those prejudices seem to come to the fore in debates such as these, with people trying to confuse/manipulate/change the narrative.
It may not be the most righteous or perfect way of raising the profile of this huge issue, but when does change ever really happen without friction and backlash? Change by its very nature is disruption. Fucking up the status quo. When the issue is as systemic and accepted as it is, big statements are needed. Big action is needed.
As a bloke of Punjabi heritage, I know what sort of racism my grandparents and parents had to deal with in the 70s and 80s. Even the 90s to be fair. My uncle and Dad got jumped by a bunch of white guys on NYE 99 - my uncle still has a metal plate in his cheek from the brick he got smacked with. Lucky for him and my Dad, a group of Indian guys were on the other side of the road and chased away that gang before they might have got killed. However, this sort of shit seems less prevalent for Indian folks. It seems that people from my ethnic background have become largely accepted in modern Britain.
However, the black community has not got the same level of acceptance. The reasons why or why not are important, but the bottom line is that this community is still lagging behind. Raising awareness and highlighting the issue is fundamental. It can’t go on. I hope we look back on this in a decade as being the turning point, because as a society we fucking need it.
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The 70s with the National Front were hard times. Racism hasn’t changed its just gone from Dr Maarten boot wearing skinheads to people in suits !! The Southall riots and daily racist abuse will live with me forever.
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She got promoted as well after this! Haha.
Not that I’m agreeing with the message but.
White lives matter = sacked from your job
White lives dont matter abolish whiteness= University defends you and promotes you.
People wonder where extremism is born.
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That’s the hypocrisy we live in crazy
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The whole narrative atm reminds me of this a couple of years ago.
Ah I’m familiar with this Priyamvada Gopal lady. So when she says abolish whiteness she is referring to an academic term that comes from a book on Post Colonialism that no one has read. The term, apparently, originates from the far right when the white supremacists decided to use the word whiteness instead of white supremacy to appeal to more people, so she means abolish that.
The problem of course is why would she want to use a term belonging to the far right, especially when no one will know that it belongs to the far right. She obviously must know this and she must also know that Twitter is not an academic paper. My personal view is that she uses the term as though clickbait.
No one serious would say abolish whiteness without explaining clearly what it meant or better yet find a better term.
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Thank you for that explanation. Fucking hell she sounds like an obnoxious bint.
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True.
You’d have expected an academic to at least string a coherent explanation together.
She just comes across as foolhardy.
“Whiteness” is something you read about if you read anti-racist academic literature. It doesn’t really have anything to do with far right movements.
Most likely was tweeting to her followers who’ve read the same kind of works.
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So an attention seeker with an intellectual superiority complex.
She’d fit right in with all of the people she hates on Reddit lol
Why is that do you think?
I would presume Asians are more likely to take jobs away from white people and that would create more animosity.
I’m not 100% sure why and that’s a really important question. Perhaps it’s that the family values are very strong within my very large extended family, as well as the families of all my Indian / Asian friends. I believe that’s a really fundamental part of my own identity.
I would say grandparents and parents born before 1980 all have very traditional Indian values and raise their kids relatively strictly compared to a lot of other ethnicities. Education is really emphasised pretty much universally. Lots of Indians own their own businesses too. That mentality / culture has helped the next generation of Indians to find a place in British society, either through a professional career or entrepreneurship etc.
It’s hardly been a smooth journey for the previous generations - racism was brutal in the 70s and 80s for British Asians (as my man @MO_OA49 will attest) but getting through that and sticking to those values has laid the foundation for the current generation to feel more at home and valued in society. That’s just my experience though, no science behind that at all.
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She said it did. That’s where I got it from. Her own feed.
This is true to a point. But she is smart enough to know who engages with her feed to not use language like that without clarity. Also, genuine question, why are anti-racist academics using definitions like ‘whiteness’. Are they fucking idiots. What kind of academic defines racism by using a skin colour? I’m genuinely curious here, not having a go.
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I can’t find anything about her saying it has far right origins.
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It’s more about how the white identity developed in the first place and what that meant at the time it happened and what it means today.
At least that’s what I read, but I suppose there are other definitions.
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Just watched a video on Twitter of a black man trying to explain to a crowd that the Lincoln statue that was pulled down was paid for by his direct descendants and that the slave in the statue was his great great grandfather.
Wait, are they pulling down the Lincoln statue?
Lincoln regulated against slavery, didn’t he?
The cultural Marxists don’t like the artistic depiction of the freeman beneath Lincoln, I guess it implies subservience in their warped minds
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Still didn’t believe in racial equality though and believes blacks were beneath.
Either way it was cool to begin with but now let’s focus on substance and not symbols. It’s important that real change is made.
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